Less than half the total population would be full-fledged warriors; but as you know, an Indian boy from the age of twelve onward can be quite effective with a deadly weapon.

In addition to the Ree, we had acquired from Gibbon’s command a few Crow scouts-this area being home ground to that tribe. I figured Custer had plenty of advice on what could be read from the trail, so did not plan to offer my services again. Did not, that is, until I happened to speak to a lieutenant of the detachment that was guarding the pack train.

We had made one of our many stops so as to resecure the hardtack and cartridge boxes that was always slipping off the mules, and I says to the lieutenant in command, pointing to the Indian trail that extended so far in width beyond our own: “Big village.”

He smiles like I was a greenhorn and allows it showed a few hundred hostiles.

I asks if that was what the Crow and Ree scouts had reported.

“No, as a matter of fact it is not,” says he. “But when you have been on frontier duty as long as I have, you always divide by three any estimate you hear from a friendly Indian. These Crows are good boys, but fighting is not their strong point.”

Well, I have spoke about my worries for the Indians and then my disinclination to see these soldiers massacred, but I have so far not mentioned my growing concern for my own arse. I left that bastardly mule train pronto, and the lieutenant, figuring I was deserting, yells that I would never get my pay, but as usual he had the wrong slant, for I rode towards the head of the column.

Bloody Knife had sold me quite a broken-down pony. Indian-style, the animal was unshod and his hoofs had wore down real bad, so he was half-lame going over the rough terrain, the soil being flinty-hard and whatever grass had grown there was ate off by the immense pony herds of the Sioux. So it took me ever so long to pass the column and when I did, Custer wasn’t at the head of it but rather a mile or two still beyond. He was famous for riding away out on point, in front of the advance guard and sometimes the scouts as well, and on other campaigns, so I heard, damn if he might not do a bit of buffalo or antelope hunting while he was at it. But he was looking for Indians now, and when I seen him upon a bluff at about three-quarters of a mile from where I was, it looked as if he had found them and got personally surrounded.

I whipped the Ree pony into a gallop and was halfway towards rescuing him when I recognized he was merely talking with the Crow scouts. By time I reached the bluff, Custer had gone off again, but the Crow was still there: White Man Runs Him, Half Yellow Face, Goes Ahead, and a young fellow named Curly. Also the guide and interpreter Mitch Bouyer, who was a breed of Crow and white.

I felt uneasy around the Crow, owing to my memories, and White Man Runs Him was old enough to have been a grown warrior in the days when I fought them. Indeed, he studied me from time to time, and while it was unlikely he really had my number, he must have Indianlike sensed something.

So I was glad to see the chief white scout come riding up from the other side of the bluff. This was a man named Charley Reynolds, a stocky, round-shouldered fellow, one of the few real good white scouts I ever knowed and no long-haired blowhard like Buffalo Bill Cody and some of them others.

The only trouble so far as talking to Reynolds went was that he was terrible quiet, keeping his own counsel to the degree that he got the nickname “Lonesome Charley.”

“Charley,” I says, and he immediately looks at the ground as was his custom when addressed, “have you told Custer how many Indians made this trail?”

He says: “Yep.”

I says: “Because some of the officers think it is just a small band.”

Charley shrugs and just keeps staring embarrassed-like into the ground while his horse stands dead still.

Mitch Bouyer comes alongside then and says, right rude if you considered him white, though understandably if you was conscious of his Indian blood: “What do you want?”

I answers: “To save my hair.”

He says very factual: “That will be hard to do, for we are going to have a goddam big fight.” He turned and rode back to the group of Crow a-sitting their horses all dejected.

Reynolds had looked up while Bouyer was talking, but when I turned back to him, he stared at the turf again.

“There’s too many for him to take on alone,” I says. “And I wager that’s what he’ll do. He won’t wait for Gibbon and Terry.”

“Nope,” says Charley, in his soft voice.

“God damn it, man, you got to make him understand. I hear he’ll listen to you.”

“He won’t,” Charley says and knees his horse so as to move along, and I seen his right hand was wrapped in a bandanna, and asked if he was hurt.

“Whitlow,” says he.

“Can you shoot?”

“Barely,” Charley says and, by now exhausted with so much talking, he got away from me.

“Reynolds is just a yellowbelly,” Sergeant Botts told me in camp that evening. “He begged Terry to let him off this campaign, claiming to have a pre-monition he would go under.”

“Bottsy,” I says, “you got a pretty poor opinion of most. I was wondering what you thought of me.”

“Jack,” says Botts, “there ain’t a lot of you, but what there is, is all white.”

Some men will get a great liking for you if you listen to them abuse others. At that moment, him and me was sitting within some bullberry bushes, getting drunk upon the contents of our canteens. I reckon it was the first real 100 per cent, lowdown, stinking, dirty case of inebriation I had been a party to since them days long ago as I wandered about the southern plains searching for Olga and Gus.

The result was that the next morning found me in very poor condition at the start of the longest day of my life.

CHAPTER 27 Greasy Grass

SATURDAY, JUNE 24, was a mean hot day, and the south wind served only to choke the men behind with the dust of them in front. It got so bad after a time that the troops was obliged each to march along a separate trail, so as not to stifle them following, and also to diminish the great cloud that marked our progress. For we was getting close to the hostiles, and it was just after the noon halt that we crossed the place where another great Indian trail, coming from the south, joined the one we had been on so far.

That was not long after we found the enormous abandoned campsite where the lodgepoles for a sun-dance lodge was still standing. On the floor of the latter was some pictures traced in the sand: lines representing pony hoofmarks on one side and them of iron-shoed cavalry horses on the other; between, figures of white men falling headfirst towards the Indian ranks.

My head was thumping, and the smell of bacon at breakfast had made me go off and heave. I felt so miserable of body that, in compensation, my mind rested somewhat easier than it had been. The Ree and Crow, however, waxed even unhappier than before, while looking at them sand drawings, and chattered to Fred Girard and Mitch Bouyer, their respective interpreters, for being Indians they was much affected by symbols.

Up come Custer shortly, and Bouyer tells him that the pictures meant “many soldiers falling upside down into the Sioux camp,” which was to say, dead.

At that point I steps forward, saying: “General-”

But he interrrupts: “It’s the teamster, isn’t it? Well, teamster,” Custer says, looking down his sharp nose, “I understood your place was with the mules.” Yet he was not sore, but rather amused. “Or do I have it wrong?” he goes on. “I am only the regimental commander.”

“Sir,” I says, wincing from my hangover, “I don’t know how good a job these scouts is doing. I believe the way they put their reports sounds to you like sheer superstition and you ignore it.” Bouyer and Girard was giving me dirty looks.